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Dessert

White Puffs

A light, meringue-based puff baked with milk and flour, topped with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

White Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Whisk the egg whites, lemon peel, and powdered sugar to form a meringue.

  2. Sift the salt with the flour before adding.

  3. Add the meringue alternately with the flour to the milk, mixing gently.

  4. Beat the mixture lightly and pour it into small, well-buttered tins or cups.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden, then turn out and sift powdered sugar over them.

  2. Serve with custard sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue that lifts the batter and gives the puffs their airy structure.
Prepared flour
Provides the starch and gluten that set the batter and hold the puffs' shape as they bake.
Rich milk
Supplies liquid and richness, moistening the batter and adding tenderness and browning.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and meringue and gives a light sugary finish when sifted on top.

The step that matters

Folding the meringue into the batter. Egg white foam is fragile and deflates under vigorous mixing. Adding meringue alternately with flour and mixing gently keeps air in the batter, so the puffs rise well in the oven.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, flour, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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